No one in Charlotte sits in the nexus of business and the World Cup more than Mac Lackey.

Lackey is the founder of Charlotte startup Kyck.com, an online soccer technology platform that provides a registration system for youth soccer players, a social media feed for soccer enthusiasts and a video clip-sharing service for soccer players and fans. Lackey, a college soccer player at Wake Forest and former pro athlete, has been involved with several Charlotte startups including InternetSoccer.com, which he sold years ago for $15 million, and Mountain Khakis.

His latest venture Kyck.com has raised about $3 million total since its 2012 launch. And next month Lackey moves to Barcelona for at least a year to help the company expand in Spain and across southern Europe. Kyck is seeing much of its growth from a registration platform that targets talented youngsters. Youth soccer club players around the U.S. and soon in Europe create profile pages on Kyck’s site. The company can then facilitate transactions from that stockpile of player data or sell the aggregated data to marketers, soccer coaches and others.

I caught up with Mac over coffee the other day to hear about his big move, the evolution of Kyck.com and, of course, how the 2014 World Cup will drive his business. Following are edited excerpts from our conversation.

And, for the record, he picked Lionel Messi-led Argentina to win the Cup.

Does the World Cup move the needle for your business?

Records are going to be set everywhere. Twitter, Facebook, every media outlet you can think of will set records. That all relates back to my business, of course. In the U.S. the games are on at great times — 12 p.m., 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. People can watch the best players in the world. Every four years we get this euphoria around soccer where the tide lifts all boats. Pre-, during and post-World Cup things are happening in the soccer world and the numbers in the U.S. get a lift from that. The lift this time will be bigger than previous cups. We’re excited.

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